The Weather Outside

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Bloop

Bloop.

Bloop.

Bloop.

Bloop.

Bloop.

Bloop.

Bloop.

Bloop.

Bloop.

The year was 1997. The place was the deep sea, off the southwest coast of South America. Once, this is when we would have broken into tactical procedures, a Soviet submarine, red death from below fast approaching. The year was 1997. This was no Soviet. This bloop, this ultra low frequency sound, it could be an animal. It could be, if it were no smaller than a blue whale, rather much larger at that. Unresolved.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Putting a Good Book Down

I've been reading the Iliad.

I can't take it any more at the moment. I'm going to take a break. I realize at this point, that while there are parts that I like, I'm just reading it for tone. No plot, character, even dialogue is getting through.

Sadly, I've come to realize it's going to be one of those books I admire and respect, but can't love. And I do admire and respect. It's got an amazing structure, for one.

But the thing is, I thought the Odyssey was amazing. It actually touched me. I'll write how it touched me some other time, but...

The Iliad... this is my second go at reading it. I first read the first 8 books back in September/October for a course before abandoning it as unneeded to get by. Now 8 more books. So I do plan on reading those last 8 books, just not at the moment.

Next in the queue, though, is Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics; should be much more palpable. I can already taste the palp.

Comedy/Dialogue II

Fishboy: Where's The Tick? You told my mom The Tick would be here.

Die Fledermaus: Listen Fishboy, I told your mom a lot of things.

- The Tick, "Ants in Pants!", Season 2

Top Five II: Similes of Homer

1.The aged Priam was the first of all whose eyes saw him
as he swept across the flat land in full shining, like that star
which comes on in the autumn and whose conspicuous brightness
far outshines the stars that are numbered in the night's darkening,
the star they give the name of Orion's Dog, which is brightest
among the stars, and yet is wrought as a sign of evil
and brings on the great fever for the unfortunate mortals.
Such was the flare of the bronze that girt his chest in his running.
--Iliad, Book XXII, li. 25-32

2. Holding this shield in front of him, and shaking two spears,
he went onward like some hill-kept lion, who for a long time
has gone lacking meat, and the proud heart is urgent upon him
to get inside of a close steading and go for the sheepflocks.
And even though he finds herdsman in that place, who are watching
about their sheepflocks, armed with spears and with dogs, even so
he has no thought of being driven from the steading without some attack made,
and either makes his spring and seizes a sheep, or else
himself is hit in the first attack by a spear from a swift hand
thrown.
--Iliad, Book XII, li. 298-307

3. As when a man who works as a blacksmith plunges a screaming
great axe blade or plane into cold water, treating it
for temper, since this is the way steel is made strong, even
so Cyclops' eye sizzled about the beam of the olive.
--Odyssey, Book IX, li. 391-394

4. Now the son of Telamon with the long spear stabbed him under
the ear, and wrenched the spear out again, and he dropped like an ash tree
which, on the crest of a mountain glittering far about, cut down
with the bronze axe scatters on the ground its delicate leafage;
--Iliad, Book XIII, li. 177-180

5. so the rafts's long timbers were scattered, but now Odysseus
sat astride one beam, like a man riding on horseback,
and stripped off the clothing which the divine Kalypso had given him,
and rapidly tied the veil of Ino around his chest, then
threw himself head first in the water, and with his arms spread
stroked as hard as he could.
--Odyssey, Book V, li. 370-375

N/A: Homeric Hymns (for obvious reasons)
Note: All translations Richmond Lattimore.

Cataloguing The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops

Year One.

104 entries.

Nathan Rabin. Man? God? The Greek Trickster Pan? Hard to be certain.

I'm doing this because I'm dissatisfied with the system for archiving these columns they have on their site. And I believe every one should read these; they're brilliant.

UPDATE: Well, Nabin posted year-ending columns that pretty much link to everything, so I don't have to:

Pee-Drinking Man-Fish I Have Known: My Year Of Flops, The Year In Review

My Year of Flops: The Final Tally

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Rat king

If I say rat king, you might be struck with noble, upstanding images of a regal rodent benevolently ruling masses of critters like clockwork. But forget your fairy tale naïveté because rat kings are the things of nightmares, scary as fuck.

Rat kings are born when a number of rats become unnaturally stuck together, their tails entangled, and grow as one to all our combined great horror. You've been warned.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

One Line Synopsis I: Fight Club

A generation of men raised by women overcompensate in their masculinity-driven self-help therapy.

One Line Synopsis

Increasingly, when I plan on making a series of something, I feel like I need to justify and explain what I'm doing. One Line Synopsis (synopses) will be attempting to describe the basics of something in one simple sentence. The something will usually be a film, a book, and hopefully I can manage albums as well (at least, concept albums). Usually, plots will likely be too complicated and the synopsis will hence be a more thematic representation. I will also try to avoid concentrator words like "and" that would allow complication and multiplicity of ideas.

Being Human I

My ongoing series in becoming as human as human:

There are others out there like me. SOURCE: xkcd

Licensing Your Consumer Rights I

Have you ever noticed that DVDs produced by specialty boutiques (examples being Criterion and Anchor Bay) often don't have the myriad of warnings (FBI, Interpol) that plague major studio releases? That's suspiciously pro-consumer. Where's Joe McCarthy when you need him? Dead? Then bring me zombie Joe McCarthy.

These unskippable warnings have become so ubiquitous to become analogous to commercial breaks, allowing you to pop in your DVD and then get any food, adjust lighting while you wait for the menu to arrive. God forbid the product you purchased to not treat you like a criminal for legally obtaining it rather than download it illegally, perhaps through a torrent. Sorry did I say buy? That implies ownership, I meant to say license. Obviously.

Man in the Mirror II

First thing I do when I come in the door is look in the mirror to see how handsome I looked on the walk home.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Gustave Doré

Back to legitimacy this week.

Gustave Doré was a badass engraver from the nineteenth century. So badass that H.P. Lovecraft praised him even, in prose: "There's something those fellows catch - beyond life - that they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it." (From "Pickman's Model"). Like most engravers, a lot of his subjects seem to be biblical (okay, by most I mean Blake; I was only thinking of Blake). Doré also illustrated some Poe, and Byron, as well as fairy tales and other non-biblical things.

The Wikipedia article is rather short, but it does contain a gallery.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Chapter Headings I: Catch-22

1. The Texan
2. Clevinger
3. Havermeyer
4. Doc Daneeka
5. Chief White Halfoat
6. Hungry Joe
7. McWatt
8. Lieutenant Schiesskopf
9. Major Major Major Major
10. Wintergreen
11. Captain Black
12. Bologna
13. Major ----- de Coverley
14. Kid Sampson
15. Piltchard & Wren
16. Luciana
17. The Soldier in White
18. The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice
19. Colonel Cathcart
20. Corporal Whitcomb
21. General Dreedle
22. Milo the Mayor
23. Nately's Old Man
24. Milo
25. The Chaplain
26. Aarfy
27. Nurse Duckett
28. Dobbs
29. Peckem
30. Dunbar
31. Mrs. Daneeka
32. Yo-Yo's Roomies
33. Nately's Whore
34. Thanksgiving
35. Milo the Militant
36. The Cellar
37. General Schiesskopf
38. Kid Sister
39. The Eternal City
40. Catch-22
41. Snowden
42. Yossarian

A Novel Idea III

Postmodernism requires particularly postmodern interludes:

You are watching a film. Spanish, with English subtitles. The lead character in the film, she is watching a film. English, with Spanish subtitles. The universe folds in on itself. Time begins a new. Light travels up to the same distance as just before. You don't notice a thing.

Reading List: Summer 2007

Going to be working for at least four months
away from my traditional haunting grounds
That being the case, expect to read a lot more
just like the situation was in the Summer of 2007
Here is what I read then

welcome to the monkey house, kurt vonnegut
nine stories, j.d. salinger
women, charles bukowski
the dead father, donald barthelme
"the call of cthulhu," h.p. lovecraft
lullaby, chuck palahniuk
survivor, chuck palahniuk
haunted, chuck palahniuk
stranger than fiction, chuck palahniuk
the final solution, michael chabon
pop art, [author unknown]
understanding comics, scott mccloud
howl, allen ginsberg
goya a&i, sarah symmons
coming through slaughter, michael ondaatje
motherless brooklyn, jonathan lethem
jitterbug perfume, tom robbins
fight club, chuck palahniuk
tipping point, malcolm gladwell

in approximate chronological order

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Tomorrow

I'm a day late with this going by usual schedule, so I decided to turn it into a metajoke. Like all metajokes I make (and I invariably make them usually and often), I'm likely the only one to enjoy it. But hey isn't that what jokemaking is about: the amusement of one's self at the befuddlement of others.

"Tomorrow is the day after today." Other things that are tomorrow are terrible, terrible music.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Personal II

MSF

Must hate Dane Cook. Preferably in its place is an impeccably dry sense of humour. Impeccably dry.

Famous People

I saw this guy who looked like Paul Martin today. His hair was a little grayer, but yeah: him. I can clearly make this conclusion after having strolled towards him and past him without hesitation to stop as I made my way into Toronto General Hospital. Toronto General Hospital? Yes, Toronto General Hospital. There he was, pretty much standing by himself in front of the entrance, no one bothering him, impeccably dressed, playing with his phone, a nice, black car behind him (yeah, you think I, being "detail-oriented" could tell you what it was, but I couldn't tell you what a fucking car is). But, yeah definitely him.

This Song Sounds Like That Song

I was listening to Rilo Kiley's 2007 release Under the Blacklight and was struck by a case of déja vu concerning the track "Close Call." I couldn't find anything to help my suspicions on Wikipedia or AllMusicGuide, but I thought long and hard about it. That's right, it was some serious detective work. Finally, I concluded it sounded like the Meat Puppets' "Lake of Fire." Now, I know this song mainly through the cover by Nirvana on their MTV Unplugged live album, and I'm sure it's the same with most people. Now actually listening to both songs, and playing them on top of each other, I concluded absolutely nothing so maybe I'm just crazy. But I think this song sounds like that song...

Today in Comparisons I

What do these two have in common?

William S. Burroughs and Ol' Dirty Bastard

Everything. Bitch, please...

Film Review: Letters from Iwo Jima

Letters from Iwo Jima

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Iris Yamashita. Story by Iris Yamashita & Paul Haggis.

Starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, and Ryo Kase.

2006.

This film was originally titled Red Sun, Black Sand before being released as Letters from Iwo Jima. Red Sun, Black Sand is infinitely cooler sounding, but Clint Eastwood didn't make that film; he made Letters from Iwo Jima. A film needs to choose it's title, and this is the title that fits.

Letters starts and ends with a framing story that is slight and irrelevant. Flags of Our Fathers, Letters' Pacific Theater companion piece also directed by Clint Eastwood in the same year, also used a framing device to somewhat more profound effect as did producer Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Why these war films feel the need to contextualize by establishing a present day epiphany is beyond me, and it only detracts from what otherwise is a fine film as is the case here.

It's interesting watching a film from the Japanese perspective of World War II. With them as the protagonists, you cheer them on in their fight against the Americans. Besides the fact that they are reviled as the enemy (they did after all attack Pearl Harbor), how often, especially in regards to modern warfare, do you watch the heroes hold a defensive position? Where's the gung ho, ra ra ra aspect in that.

The use of flashbacks only proves to slow down the momentum. The worst moment comes when Shimizu (Kase) reiterates the beautiful simplicity of the scene where Baron Nishi (Ihara) read aloud from a letter from home taken off a dead American soldier. Yes, "his mother's words are the same as my mother's words"-- we understood it the first time with the looks on the Japanese soldiers' faces, we didn't need to be hit over the head with it. This contribution is no doubt the influence of Paul Haggis. Haggis' lack of subtlety seems to be his trademark at this point, and was a major flaw in his other Clint Eastwood collaborations as well as his own directorial efforts. The only places where it hasn't seemed problematic were his screenplay for Casino Royale and, fittingly, (snicker) Walker, Texas Ranger.

The one flashback that manages to earn its keep is General Kuribayashi's (Watanabe) remembrance of his American military hosts on what appears to be a diplomatic point in time. It manages to highlight the central themes: being patriotism versus the horror that is war. Soldiers are just good men, mostly innocent, fighting for what they've been told is right, not too blame for the machinations and politics of their leaders.

There is also a sense of conflicting thoughts of tactic. Kuribayashi finds dissent among some of the officers beneath him who would like to die an honourable death fighting. I don't know what the Japanese reaction to the film was, but I get a sense from oriental/occidental critical theory that Asian societies are supposed to be more of a collective sensibility versus Western individuality, and I get a sense of that here, somewhat. But then again, all films need to find a focus, and that means individuals. And the individual with a standout role here is Kazunari Ninomiya as the soldier of our focus, Saigo. He is a coward. He is a good soldier. He is not a soldier. He is a simple baker. He is a husband. He is all these things. And he captures them all well. Especially, considering his early scenes that present him as a somewhat bumbling, comic relief of the 'Is my commanding officer standing directly behind me as I ignorantly say unpatriotic words' variety.

Weekly Wikipedia Find: Borscht Belt

This week's entry isn't so much a find since I intentionally tracked it down.

I was talking with a comrade about comedy stylings after one more use of subversive wordplay on my part and he suggested that I was a man not of my time. Rather I should long to be a writer of the Restoration. There was a time when the wittiest motherfucker in the room was wrist deep in the best pussy. I responded that perhaps vaudeville would have been a more suitable environment for my talents. His argument was obviously more compelling.

It almost feels like I should be writing about the Restoration now, or at least vaudeville, rather than the Borscht Belt which has nothing to do with the former and only a very tenuous connection to the latter. The Borscht Belt, roughly a summer resort area in the Catskill mountains popular with Jews, is more notable for the humour which thrived in its confines. This comedy is often self-deprecating and usually of the rapid-fire variety. I put myself down often, but usually I think long and hard about it first. I obviously have a long way to come.

That's what she said.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion

Most Anticipated 2008: The Dark Knight

Today is the first of the year, and at this moment, the film I am looking forward to most in 2008 is The Dark Knight. Not to be too much of a Batman fanboy, but the combination of being so utterly satisfied with Batman Begins as well as the official trailers and posters for the new film are building my expectations. That first official trailer, oh boy, it sends me two conflicting messages. I want to watch and re-watch so much, yet at the same time never watch it again lest anything be too familiar and jarringly contextualized when I finally see the film come summer. And I refuse to watch the first sequence from the film that can be found pirated after being released in front of I Am Legend on IMAX screens. I need to save something. I have some sense of aesthetic dignity. And I have complete faith in Christopher Nolan that I need not become ingrained in the marketing.

Can't sleep. Clown'll eat me.

Man in the Mirror

Do you ever look in the mirror and think, "you're the one I want to be with"?

Yeah, I'm kind of a narcissist. Which kind? The worst kind.

Live Blogging the New Year

11:59:50. Ten seconds to go.

11:59:51. Nine seconds to go.

11:59:52. Eight seconds to go.

11:59:53. Seven seconds to go.

11:59:54. Six seconds to go.

11:59:55. Five seconds to go.

11:59:57. Three seconds to go.

11:59:58. Two seconds to go.

11:59:59. One second to go.

11:59:58. Watch malfunctions; stops. I knew I should have done my tracking with a digital clock.

12:00:02. Digital clock says it's 2008.